Jurassic Park, Timelessness, And a Spielberg Rant

To answer Kerry’s question, I actually ended up not liking The Terror very much. Its ending, I feel, was a major cop-out, and basically I got tired of it long before the ending even finally came around. The Victorian rave on the ice was awesome, and the opening was awesome, and the rest was dumb, except I did enjoy the exhaustive research that went into it. I learned so much about 19th century Arctic exploration! Oh god, the smells

The Dog Stars ended up being totally wonderful. I cried and cried. I highly recommend it. I don’t even want to talk about it or I’ll jinx it. If you love dogs please have an entire box of kleenex at the ready. Nothing bad happens to a dog or anything like that, it’s more a cosmic dog sadness.

Last night we spontaneously went to see Jurassic Park in 3D. I have such a weird relationship with this movie–for some reason, it is the main movie in my life that refuses to age appropriately in my mind-space. I am always shocked every time I hear that it is 20 years old, over and over again. I think this movie holds such an odd, pivotal spot in our generation’s cultural unconscious or something. I was never even necessarily the biggest fan, but somehow it seems timeless and eternal, like it was always released just “a few years ago.” Now here it is, 20 years old, everyone wearing khaki and denim, Dr. Malcolm’s bad-boy status over-emphasized by a profusion of black leather.

On the way in, I stopped at the Gap because they are the only place that makes underwear I like, and all my underwear is 3 years old and heinous. Grabbing a handful, I took it up to the perky cashier, who complimented me on taking care of myself by getting new panties. She asked us what we were doing tonight, and we said we were going to see Jurassic Park in 3D. She said that was great. We were talking to her like it was all obvious. Like obviously you go to Jurassic Park in 3D, just like you go to the re-released Star Warses, you revisit your childhood, it’s all in good fun. Then she said she’d never seen Jurassic Park and that she wasn’t born yet when it came out.

This is what I mean about the shock of Jurassic Park’s actual location in historical time. I was flabbergasted by this interaction. Logically I comprehend the concept that a movie is released in a given year, and that any number of people are not going to be born yet in that year, just like I wasn’t born yet when A Streetcar Named Desire came out, and that is fine, that is no problem for me in terms of comprehension. But for some reason it doesn’t make sense with Jurassic Park and I guess it never will.

I said to her after a few beats of shocked silence: “….Wow. You must be….SO much younger than we are.” She said “Yeah I am.”

Thanks for the sexy panties, kid. I’m gonna go order my coffin now

My thoughts:
– Jeff Goldblum was (is) an ASTOUNDING babe. I had forgotten. Re: timelessness and the lack thereof–in this movie he plays a sex hunk, and now (on The League) he plays the father of someone my age

– Me: “Everyone’s butts look so weird!” Old Man: “It’s because everyone’s PANTS are so weird”

– Literally every character survives except the villains and the black guy. Oh and I guess the hunter. So nevermind I guess. But did you know that in the book, Jeff Goldblum totally dies at the end? He gets mauled by the T-Rex and then slowly wastes away from gangrene on a cot in the control room. Some of his last moments are spent helplessly lying on his back looking at the skylight, where the velociraptors are busily chewing through the defunct electrified grate covering the window. Dark! But then, because it would be impossible for that character to die in a Spielberg film, he survives the movie. Ok fine, but then did you know that thus when Michael Crichton wrote the sequel to his BOOK, which was another BOOK called Lost World, he had Jeff Goldblum suddenly miraculously survive? It’s literally like “Everyone thought Dr. Malcolm had died during that harrowing ending to the last book but guess what he didn’t die!” He directed his novel according to the whims of filmmaking! I find that very interesting. Michael Crichton, as you know, was a total maniac.

– Honestly I don’t think CGI has progressed much since JP. I expected the dinos to look dumb but they totally don’t–or, they only look as dumb as all CGI still does to me. So kudos in that regard, I guess.

– Why did “clever girl” become such a meme? I guess because it is awesome. A meme before memes existed

– “I can’t get Jurassic Park back online without Dennis Nedry”: Samuel L. Jackson’s greatest cinematic moment, or not?

– Stephen Spielberg has made one good movie in his entire life (Jaws, obviously) and the rest of his career has been spent remorselessly and consciously repeating that formula over and over again. I was really struck by the profound emptiness of his movies. How it is impossible to have feelings for any of his characters, because they don’t have any feelings. Everyone serving as a blank archetype for something else, in particular his children, who are always just these facile, bullshit, nostalgia-projections of “kidness.” The Kid as wholly infantile, wholly innocent, to such an extent that even Lex–who appears to be almost of menstruating age–appears as almost idiotically naive. We talked afterward for hours about how Spielberg’s films are actually just this one repeating pattern that itself cues us about how to feel about that pattern. The characters act out the awe and wonder we as viewers are meant to feel about the miracle of cinema. The slack-jawed gaping and gasping at the sight of the brachiosaurus lets us know we too are meant to become agog at the magic of CGI, etc. None of the characters’ responses to any event feel meaningful or emotionally realistic in any way; everyone reacts to everything in pretty much the opposite way a real person would react, thus they can only be experienced as cartoonish figments, ghosts mindlessly repeating the same action over and over again, doomed to forever recapitulate whatever they were doing when captured in the moment of death. Spielberg’s ouevre is like this perfect distillation of everything horrible about the Baby Boomers, and indeed when his films are written about by Boomers like Denby/Lane and their ilk, they–educated intellectuals all–thoughtlessly focus simply on How Well He Fulfilled His Obligations To The Formula, rather than taking issue with the formula itself or why there has to be one in the first place, or even noticing that there IS one. It’s alarming. The old man made the completely brilliant observation that when the average viewer uses the pejorative “formulaic” to dismiss a film as crappy, what they actually are pointing to is that film’s FAILURE to abide by the formula explicitly set out by its genre or whatever. Like if The Fast and the Furious is “formulaic,” what that really means is that it’s been distilled to just its set pieces–a series of essentially unattached car chases and explosions–and has neglected to include the in-between stuff that gives us the illusion of coherence in a film. So like, it’s “formulaic” because it’s nonsensical–the villain basically just announces “Hello, I’m the villain for no reason,” the good guy similarly just IS the good guy, romances don’t feel prepared or founded on anything, and with each car chase we have already forgotten what prompted it or what the hoped-for outcome is meant to be. We call this shoddy filmmaking style “formulaic” but it’s actually a BETRAYAL of formula. It gives us just the skeleton of the formula without any of the cartilage. The old man noted that these films are really more like abstract cinema than mainstream narratives, composed of bursts of color and sound detached from overarching meaning. The actual formulaic movies are those like Spielberg’s, which so relentlessly flesh-out the repeating formula that we are stunned into passive consumption, unable to even perceive what we are being bottle-fed, our every reaction already expressly coded into the behavior of the characters themselves. It actually takes WORK to step back and note all the ways Jurassic Park fails to be comprehensible. A movie like The Fast and the Furious wears its incomprehensibility on its sleeve; it takes no effort whatsoever to observe its failure to cohere into a linear narrative. Spielberg’s movies are much more insidiously meaningless.

– all that being said, credit where credit’s due: the first T-Rex attack scene remains totally fucking riveting

– remember the part in the book where they hide behind the waterfall and then it seems like they spend hours trying to avoid the T-Rex’s tongue? Jesus Christ.

In Other News

The other day we were walking down the sidewalk, and I happened to pick up a stick that was in the yard because I thought the lawn mower would run over it awkwardly. As we passed our neighbor’s house, her 5 or 6 year old son was playing outside. He was talking to himself, and when we walked by he said, all at once, “Hey where are you guys going? What are you doing with that stick?” which was already pretty awesome. Then I said “here, you can have it,” and handed it to him, and he took it, and said with awe, “Hey, that’s a good stick!” I said “I know” and we walked away. SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE. The perception of a “good stick.” What does it mean? It can’t be explained, yet is real, and felt by all.

And

Yesterday walking the dog a small child, perhaps 3 years old, was toddling along holding his mom’s hand, and as we passed he said “Can I pat the dog?” and the mom said “ask them” and he said “Can I pat the dog?” to us, and we said “you can try, but he won’t let you,” because the snoopy’s M.O. with children is to leap frantically away from them in a total panic, sometimes also barking in terror, which is awkward and frightening. This time, though, surprising us totally, he went right up to the kid and stuck his nose in the kid’s face, something he’s never done before in all his life. This made the kid roar with laughter, which is just automatically funny and delightful, but then snoopy proceeded to sniff the kid’s shirt and then lick it once, tenderly. The kid then yelled “HE GAVE ME A KISS ON MY SHIRT! THAT’S SO FUNNY!!!”

It is pretty fun to be alive I guess